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Indian Enslavement in Virginia

Indians were enslaved in
Virginia by settlers and traders from shortly after the founding of Jamestown until the end of
the eighteenth century, peaking late in the seventeenth century and providing a
workforce for English plantations and households. By this time the Atlantic slave trade was at
its peak, flooding Virginia with cheaper African labor. African slavery took nearly a century to develop,
however, and in the meantime those white Virginians who required men and women to
work as servants or in tobacco fields
mostly relied on indentured
servants and enslaved Indians. Europeans sold guns for slaves in an existing
indigenous trading market, and encouraged allied tribes to provide the slaves by
targeting Indian groups on the periphery of English settlements (similar to African
participation in the capture of slaves in Africa). While there are examples of
continued enslavement of Indians throughout the early settlement period, mass
enslavement typically coincided with the upheaval of war that led to Indian prisoners
who could be sold as slaves. Virginia's laws were neither clear nor effective with
respect to the enslavement of Indians, at times banning the practice and at other
times encouraging it. Some scholars argue that Indian enslavement had declined by
1800 because Indians were prone to illness or escape, but others maintain that it was only
when Indians, wracked by war and enslavement, could not provide a sufficient quantity
of cheap workers that English colonists turned primarily to chattel African slavery.
American Indians were most clearly deemed free by Virginia law early in the 1800s,
and Indians who were unable to gain their freedom often became assimilated within the
predominantly African slave communities. MORE...

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Early Forms of Slavery during Settlement

Slavery, generally absent any modern conception of race, had long been common
practice around the world and usually involved the enslavement of war captives.
For centuries before European settlement, American Indian tribes had enslaved
other Indians as a cultural practice—but not as a means of recruiting a dominant
labor source. The Spanish, in turn, enslaved Indians to work on North American
sugar plantations, using the repartimiento and encomienda systems to apportion Indians and land, and to
govern their use, respectively. Only when mistreatment decimated whole indigenous
populations did the Spanish government, in 1542, outlaw Indian slavery, at least
in name. The practice continued in deed.

Neither the Spanish nor the English
immediately sought to enslave the Indians they encountered. Indian slavery did not
become official Spanish policy until 1503, or eleven years after first contact. It
is clear that the English wanted to mimic Spanish efforts at creating indigenous
tributaries for a labor force, but it took them even longer. The tributary
relationship involved the exchange of Indian goods and labor for colonial
protection against enemy tribes. Upon their arrival in 1607, the English initially
sought to establish this kind of tributary trading relationship with the Algonquian-speaking Indians of
Tsenacomoco, a paramount
chiefdom of twenty-eight to thirty-two small chiefdoms and tribes
stretching from the James to
the Potomac rivers. The
Indians had food the English needed
and the English provided tools, weapons, fabric, and copper-made items the Indians
considered to be spiritually valuable. Indians labored for the English as
indentured servants without clearly defined rights or lengths of service. Conflict
soon weakened such relationships.

An early mention of an Indian slave
appears in the context of the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614). In
his Trewe Relacyon, George Percy recounts an English march on an Indian town guided by an
Indian named
Kempes, who was "led in a hand locke" and is described as a slave working under
the threat of beatings and beheading. The war, meanwhile, resulted in English
expansion outside Jamestown, which helped create another use for forced Indian
labor. With the subsequent development of tobacco as a cash crop came the need for
an abundant and cheap labor supply to work the fields. Then, on March 22, 1622,
Indians under the leadership of Opechancanough attacked settlements along the James River, killing
nearly a third of the English population and initiating the Second Anglo-Powhatan
War (1622­–1632). With the friendly tributary approach decaying, a new
English policy toward the Indians was born of this violence and found expression
in the official Virginia Company
of London report of the 1622 attack, A Declaration of the state
of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia. Describing Virginia's
Indians as "a rude, barbarous, and naked people" who worship the devil, the
report's author argued that "the Indians who before were used as friends may now
most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery." As the historian C. S.
Everett has explained, the enslavement of Indians from 1610 to 1645 tended to be a
form of "punitive retribution."

Animosity and distrust was growing between the English and the Indians. Indians
continued to provide labor under circumstances that, while legally unclear, often
amounted to slavery. Everett has argued that deeds and wills from this time period
indicate that Indians were inherited within white families and that they "were not
indentured servants … Indisputably, and by 1661 at the latest, Indians could
be—and were—lifelong servants." In other words, they were slaves.

Only after the Third Anglo-Powhatan
War (1644–1646) did Indian slavery become a lucrative part of the
Virginia economy. The treaty ending the war defined the tribes and chiefdoms of Tsenacomoco as
a tributaries and subject to English rule, requiring yearly payment to the crown
and dictating where Indians could live, hunt, and trade. To coerce Indians to
comply with the treaty, the English also demanded that Indian children "shall or
will freely or voluntarily come in and live with the English"—serving as
hostage-servants in English households. The English claimed they were educating
and converting the children to Christianity as part of the tributary system, but
many Indians complained that these children were subsequently sold on the slave
market.

By 1649, the enslavement of children in English households and the stealing of
Indian children for the slave market was so common that the General Assembly
enacted two laws:
one
stipulating that no tributary children could be sold as slaves,
the
other
that they could not be kept in households after the age of twenty-five. The
assembly passed similar prohibitions in 1655, 1656, and in 1657, outlining
punishments for anyone stealing and enslaving Indian children. Despite these laws,
by the late seventeenth century many Indians refused to bring their children to
English households due to the threat of enslavement. And even as Virginia
prohibited the enslavement of Indian children, the government sometimes encouraged
it. Officials in Accomack
County, for instance, on June 16, 1670,
commissioned
a man they called "Mr. John" to find Indian children to sell to the settlers.

Not only were children being enslaved after the 1646 treaty, but the treaty's
provisions for English dominance led to the practice of enslaving Indians for
legal violations and even as a means of financing war. For instance, when John
Powell appealed to the General Assembly in 1660 for damages caused by Indians in
Northumberland
County, the assembly responded with
a retribution
act
compensating him with the sale of Wicocomoco Indians, who would be "apprehended
and sold into a fforraigne country." The historian Edmund S. Morgan has explained
that the casual nature of this act "speaks volumes" about the acceptability of
enslaving Indians by this period.

Similarly in 1666, Governor Sir William Berkeley
presided over the General Court and
declared
that hostilities with the tribes of the Northern Neck be revenged by "utter
destruction," and that taking "their women and children and their goods"—i.e.,
selling them—would compensate the colony for the costs of the expedition. Although
a 1670 law
indicated that captives should be servants who are freed at age thirty and not
slaves bound to a lifetime of forced labor, the law was largely ignored.

After 1646, Indian labor was more common in many forms, from child hostages to
indentured servants to slaves. These enslaved Indians worked in the fields and as
house servants, interpreters, hunters, and guides. English colonists preferred
enslaved Indian women and children as domestic laborers, rather than African or
white laborers, because they were considered easiest to train and control. Indian
men were perceived to pose a greater risk of obstinacy and escape, and so they
were often profitably sold to American buyers as far away as New England or to the
sugar plantations in the West Indies (where they could not escape). The historian
Everett has argued that when these external markets became available, financial
incentive overtook vengeance as the primary driver of Indian enslavement. When the
English colonists began to participate in an existing Indian trade that involved
slaves and guns, Indian enslavement briefly became an important part of the
colonial economy.

Trading Guns for Slaves

By the middle of the seventeenth century,
labor-intensive tobacco dominated the Virginia economy, requiring a large and
steady workforce. In addition to mostly white indentured servants and African
slaves, English colonists also relied on enslaved Indians. They were purchased
often from other Indians, who captured their enemies and traded them to English
dealers for English guns. Once some tribes began to be well-armed from the gun
trade, others were often compelled to enter the market: if they didn't arm
themselves with European weapons and enslave other Indians, they would themselves
become targets of slavers. As the English increasingly wanted to trade for slaves,
and Indians increasingly wanted to trade for guns, the market focused more on
slaves while also becoming more violent.

Several Indian tribes became prominent slavers in Virginia, including the
Ricahecrian tribe. Originally from the area around Lake Erie, in New York, the
tribe had been displaced by the Iroquois during the Beaver Wars, a series of
Indian conflicts during the mid-1600s. In 1656, the Ricahecrian Indians abandoned
their settlements in New York and moved south, seeking trade at the falls of the
James River in Henrico County. After settling in Virginia and becoming known as
the Westo, they became feared raiders. Initially, Colonel Edward Hill was
charged
by the General Assembly with nonviolently removing the Westo Indians from the
region. However, Hill's militia, aided by Pamunkey and Chickahominy forces, fought
the Westo at the Battle of Bloody Run (1656), in Richmond, which resulted in the
death of Totopotomoy, weroance, or chief, of the Pamunkey.
The assembly subsequently
suspended
Hill and charged him with paying for an agreement of peace with the tribe. The
Westo then secured arrangements with English traders to barter guns for slaves.
The colony was less concerned with forcing the Westo Indians into tributary status
and more interested in profitable trade.

The Westo built an arsenal and began overpowering local tribes in Virginia and
North Carolina, enslaving captives for the marketplace. The trade was so
successful that, by late 1656, the Westo had expanded their influence, moved
farther south out of Virginia to the Savannah River (in what would become
Georgia), and began raiding as far south as the Spanish mission towns in the
Florida. They raided communities, killing and enslaving for the English market. By
1659, the Spanish reported that these raiders were armed with guns and assisted by
traders from Jamestown, such as the preeminent English trader Abraham Wood, who
fed the newly enslaved Indians into the Virginia marketplace. In early 1662,
Governor Berkeley placed Wood in charge of all trade with Indians like the Westo.

When the Westo vacated their place on the Virginia Piedmont trading path, members
of the Occaneechi tribe, living on the falls of the Roanoke River, established
themselves as the dominant Indian slave brokers in Virginia. As this trade in guns
and slaves became larger and more profitable, conflict among tribes increased.
Violence erupted on small and large scales. In 1670, for instance, Occaneechi
Indians responded to Westo raids, killing Westo Indians aligned with Wood. The
Westo and the Occaneechi raids spurred tribal conflict throughout the entire
Southeast, and many Indians were killed, enslaved, or otherwise scattered.

Bacon's Rebellion and the Late Seventeenth Century

There were sporadic attempts in Virginia to regulate the Indian slave trade, often
motivated to ensure that the government retained part of the profits. These
regulations ultimately had little influence on the trading economy. Laws allowing
Indian war prisoners to be enslaved were enacted in
1660,
1668,
and
1676.
A law requiring Indian war captives to be servants and not
slaves was passed in 1670 but largely ignored. The General Assembly required
licenses to engage in trade with the Indians, but many traders easily participated
outside of these regulations.

While trade between colonists and Indians
grew, so did conflict and animosity. King Philip's War (1675–1676) was a violent
but failed attack on the New England colonists by allied area tribes that struck
fear of hostile Indians into even Virginia colonists, who were not only
increasingly suspicious of Indians but also cognizant that Indian conflict
increased their access to slaves for the booming international market.

Laws that sometimes contradicted one another and were only sometimes enforced,
combined with local anxieties and government policies that varied from brokering
peace to encouraging warfare helped create instability. This, in turn, served as a
backdrop to Bacon's
Rebellion, which began in 1676.

William Byrd I, a former
militia captain, operated a successful trading business at his Falls Plantation,
on the James River. He traded in guns, rum, tools, cloth, and Indians. In 1676,
warfare between Potomac River Valley tribes and English settlers led to a raid by
Susquehannock Indians that killed several of Byrd's employees. Byrd did not
believe the General Assembly acted strongly enough in avenging his losses, and his
dissent, combined with trading partner Nathaniel Bacon's longstanding disputes with the
governor over when and how he could wage war against the Indians, sparked the
failed rebellion. By its end a year later, colonists had routed both the
Susquehannock Indians and the allied Occaneechi.

Byrd eventually reaffirmed his loyalty to the General Assembly and reestablished
his trade in enslaved Indians and, later, Africans. Still, the question of how to
legislate Indian enslavement had not been settled. Colonists benefited from the
hostilities with and among Indians by gaining captured slaves and land, and they
successfully pressed for
government-sanctioned
violence
against Indians. The General Assembly subsequently passed a 1682 act
confirming the legality of enslaving Indians. For reasons unclear to scholars, the
assembly then passed a 1683
act
reversing this position and stating that no Indian could be a slave.

While the assembly exhibited indecision about enslaved Indians, vacillating
between the benefits of peaceful co-existence and the profits of trade in enslaved
laborers, Indians suffered extensively in the late 1600s from warfare and
enslavement. Records cannot provide exact numbers, but scholars estimate that up
to 50,000 Indians were sold into slavery from the southeast during this period,
many of them presumably ending up in the West Indies. Virginians became more and
more suspicious of local Indians and the increased violent conflicts had taken a
serious toll on Indians. The raiding Westo and Occaneechi Indians had helped
instigate growing intertribal warfare, decimating or enslaving Indian populations
all over the Southeast. As a result, Indian tribes began refusing to engage in
trade with settlers, but there also were many fewer people left to enslave.

The Decline of Enslaving Indians

By late in the seventeenth century,
African slaves were overwhelming the colonial market, providing more abundant
labor with less internal conflict than enslaved Indians. Indentured servants,
which had served as a primary labor source, were even less available and more
expensive than slaves. The General Assembly still found a use for Indian
enslavement however, when it punished the Nansiattico Indians in 1705 for a single
murder by exporting the entire surviving Nansiattico community to Antigua for sale
as slaves. This was the same year that the assembly passed a comprehensive
slave
code
solidifying the shift of the colonial economy from one based on indentured
servitude to a slave-labor system remaining until the American Civil War (1861–1865): it declared all
slaves, African or Indian, "real estate." Enslaved laborers became de-humanized
under the law, ushering in the southern economic system that protected the rights
of white planters and viewed enslaved laborers as property to be exploited.

While Indian slaves and servants continued to
appear throughout Virginia in the eighteenth century, by 1800, Indian slavery as
an economy was completely overtaken by the influx from the African slave trade.
Scholars disagree on the exact reasons for the fall of Indian slavery in the
colonies, with some suggesting that the Indians' poor health and ease of escape
made them harder to control than imported Africans who had little knowledge of the
terrain or language; while others point to strict economic factors, citing the
cheap and abundant labor market available through African slave trade, and the
ease with which black people could fit into the ever-solidifying concept of a
white versus black racial system in the early United States. Virginia court cases
in the early 1800s including Hudgins v. Wright (1806)
finally provided a lasting declaration that Indians would be a free class of
people, and that freedom would be based upon proof of Indian maternity. This
ruling followed the legal precedent from 1662 that servitude follows "the condition of the
mother." Many enslaved Indians filed petitions for freedom, and won. Many others
did not have access to courts or the ability to file a suit. Over time, several
states followed Virginia's precedent and legalized the freedom of Native peoples.
Enslaved Indians did not disappear from Virginia after this ruling, but they did
become a less visible issue, with the larger focus turning towards legislating the
African chattel slavery that fueled the South's exploding plantation economy.

At this time, many countries internationally protested the Atlantic slave trade,
and it was halted England in 1807 and the United States in 1808. In response, the
former colonies established a robust interstate slave trade to meet their
continued agricultural labor needs.

Time Line

March 22, 1622
- Indians under Opechancanough unleash a series of attacks that start the Second Anglo-Powhatan War. The assault was originally planned for the fall of 1621, to coincide with the redisposition of Powhatan's bones, suggesting that the attack was to be part of the final mortuary celebration for the former chief.

April 18, 1644
- Opechancanough and a force of Powhatan Indians launch a second great assault against the English colonists, initiating the Third Anglo-Powhatan War. As many as 400 colonists are killed, but rather than press the attack, the Indians retire.

October 1646
- The General Assembly confirms the Treaty of Peace with Necotowance, a peace treaty ending the Third Anglo-Powhatan War and creating Native tributaries.

1656
- The Ricahecrian Indians, later known as the Westo, arrive at James River Falls and become a dominant trader in enslaved Indians.

1675
- By this year, Nathaniel Bacon, with William Byrd, is participating in trade with some of the Indians on the southwestern border of settled Virginia. His antipathy of Governor Sir William Berkeley, who also participates in the trade, may date to this time.

April 1676
- The Susquehannocks kill two men working for the Indian trader William Byrd I. His partner, Nathaniel Bacon, also loses men, prompting the General Assembly to approve a garrison near the falls of the James River to protect the colony from further incursion.

May 1676
- Governor Sir William Berkeley expels Nathaniel Bacon from the Council and brands him a rebel. Bacon is the leader of militiamen in the upper reaches of the James River valley and is preparing, against the governor's instructions, to attack friendly Indians.

November 1676
- The most bitter and intense fighting of Bacon's Rebellion comes after the death of Nathaniel Bacon the previous month. Rebels retain control of nearly all of Virginia outside the Eastern Shore.

December 25, 1676
- Forces loyal to Governor Sir William Berkeley rout a garrison of rebels on the Southside during Bacon's Rebellion. Over the course of the next week, the two main rebel commanders (based on the York River) are persuaded to switch sides.

January 1677
- After regaining Governor Sir William Berkeley's favor, William Byrd I helps round up the last of the rebels who took part in Bacon's Rebellion.

October 1705
- In "An act concerning Servants and Slaves," the General Assembly compiles and revises more than eighty years of law regarding indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

Categories

References

Further Reading

Everett, C. S. "'They shalbe slaves for their lives': Indian Slavery in
Colonial Virginia." In Indian Slavery in Colonial America,
edited by Alan Gallay, 67–108. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1975.

Rice, James D. Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and
the Transformation of Early America. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
University Press, 2012.